My first time: Straight Outta Suburbia
by Steve Barker
In 1989 I was nine years old, and my cassette tape collection consisted of The Goonies soundtrack and RUN DMC’s Raising Hell. Goonies because I liked the movie and when my dad offered to by me a tape it was the only thing I recognized in the store, and RUN DMC because my older brother convinced me to buy it for the sole purpose of him dubbing it off me later. The Goonies soundtrack didn’t get much play in my tape deck, mainly because it didn’t have the approval of my brother. I did like RUN DMC, but it was because my brother liked them that they were my favorite group. One time at my father’s business Christmas party, I wrote “RUN DMC KICKS BUTT” on a dry erase board meant for children’s Christmas wishes and snowman drawings.
One afternoon, my brother pulled me into his room with the promise of something really cool he had to show me, but first I had to swear that I would not let my parent’s know what he was about to introduce me to. “Mom bought this for me, but she made me promise I wouldn’t let you listen to it,” he said. This was right after Tipper Gore’s attack on music. My brother, being thirteen, needed my mother to purchase the cassette for him since it was branded with a Parental Advisory sticker. Without even knowing what he was talking about, I was intrigued. When you’re nine years old, anything forbidden is cool. First he showed me the cover of the cassette: six guys huddled in a circle wearing black hats, sunglasses, and one of them had a gun. He put the tape into his stereo, “You’re now about to witness the strength of street knowledge,” then the room shook with the first bump of the bass. “Straight outta Compton, a crazy mother fucker named Ice Cube,” roared out the speakers. My eyes widened and a smile crossed my face. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before; the bass and drums dominated the music unlike the Bon Jovi I heard on the radio or the Beatles my father played on Sunday afternoons. After each member introduced themselves and the song ended, I was hooked. Eazy E was my favorite, because he was “A crazy dope brother who will smother, word to the mother fucker.”
Living in a middle-class suburb of Toronto called Markham, and being nine years old, it’s easy to assume that I didn’t understand what the music was about. And I didn’t, but that didn’t stop me from immediately changing my wardrobe and attitude. I traded all my Blue Jays and Maple Leafs paraphernalia for Raiders and Kings, even though I couldn’t name a single player on either team, and my Jordache jeans for whatever pants I could dig out of my brother’s closet that were too small for him and too big for me.
NWA glamorized the gangsta life for me and I didn’t even know it actually existed. I started imagining I was being chased by the police as a game and added bitch and fuck into my schoolyard vocabulary. Just a few months earlier, I watched the movie Colors with my dad and asked him why every character’s name was “Holmes.” But everyday walking back and forth to elementary school, I sang out songs like “Gangsta Gangsta” as if I was a member of the Compton Posse. In forth grade, I wrote “F _ _ _ the Police” as my favorite song for a class time capsule. I still don’t know why my teacher never mentioned it. Maybe she realized that by commenting, it would only make me like it more. Maybe that was the whole reason I did it, just to get a rise out of her.
About a month after my brother secretly let me listen to Straight Outta Compton, he and I got into a fight. Why I can’t remember. He probably wasn’t letting me hang out with him and his friends, or he beat me in Blades of Steel too many times. To get back at him I told my mom about what he had exposed me to. Instead of my mother punishing him, which I was most certainly hoping would happen, she sat me down to talk about what I had heard. Surprisingly, she said it was okay for me to listen to NWA just as long as I knew what I was listening to. She told me it was never okay to refer to a woman as a bitch or ho and I was absolutely never to use the word nigger. I was also not allowed to bring a copy of the cassette to any of my friend’s houses. I obeyed these rules when I was home, but kept using the words bitch and ho, mainly as an insult to my guy friends when we played hockey.
To this day, I still listen to the album at least once every couple of months, only now I don’t pretend I’m being chased by the police. An experience I got to live for real when I was 15 only to find out it was the opposite of fun. The Kings and Raiders gear has disappeared (Later I found out I hate the Raiders, and I don’t root for any hockey team that isn’t Canadian). The swear words no longer make me smile, and I’m left with the music: Great beats and rhymes that tell great stories. It still scares some conservative folks, but not the masses it once did.
Eazy E died of AIDS, showing the world it wasn’t just gays who could be victims. Ice Cube now does children’s movies. And Dr. Dre opened the door for a new rapper to scare suburban housewives, Eminem. I’m sure many kids felt the same way I did about Straight Outta Compton when they first heard The Slim Shady LP. But to any one in their mid twenties 8 Mile will never compare to Compton. And Compton can’t even compare to Compton. When I was 21 years old, I lived in Orange County and frequently made trips to Hollywood to hang out with a friend of mine. One time, I got off the wrong exit and ended up driving through Compton. At first I was terrified, because if NWA taught me anything, white folks don’t go to Compton. After crossing through a few intersections, I realized I wasn’t going to be carjacked or shot at. It actually disappointed me a little. That’s when I realized that NWA wasn’t a group of hardcore gangstas; they were a group of great musicians and storytellers.
Steve is an editor for when it rains from the ground up. More information about him can be found at www.write2die.com.
